Top Tabs

Monday, September 17, 2007

Whew! The last several weeks have been pretty hectic. A big thanks to all my readers for stopping by and for your thoughtful comments.

I have been asked, more than a few times already, why the heck are you asking for stripping as a keyword anchor text link in your contest. Well I finally got a chance the other day to stop and take a look at my stats for the previous month. One area that I wanted to take a close look at was how my search engine traffic was going, and which keywords were driving the most traffic. What I found was that over the last 30 days my most popular content and they keywords that really drive traffic didn't quite mesh. Honestly I'm not yet real sure what this means, but here are some numbers. My first impression though is that I am not doing as well as I should in both writing for targeted keywords and for readability. As I'm curious by nature I figured I would try a little experiment based on the numbers below and see what happens. That is the short answer for the stripping inclusion. I will also be making more of an effort to write better for my targeted keyword list.

Now what really jumped out from these numbers, in my view, was the disparity in pages/visit and avg time on site #'s. The numbers for the "stripping" keyword(s) had a much higher pages/visit and avg. time on site than any of the other top keywords. Again not exactly sure why, by my thought is that it might be the "novelty" factor. What I mean is that they get to my site and realize it isn't quite what they are looking for but the "novelty" of the article catches their attention. I am just that good :). Not really. Well I know that Bloggrrl had a similar problem with masturbation being one of her top terms for a while. Well I figured I would do my blogging version of "if you can't beat'em, join'em." I really would have figured that the traffic generated by the stripping keywords would have had low pages/visit, avg time on site, and a high bounce rate. They had none of those to my surprise. So looking at the stats for these keywords I figured I might just a do a bit more experimentation and see after another month what happens. That is why, in answer to several questions, I once again used the term stripping in a post title. I figured that while working on writing better for my list of actual targeted keywords, I could also take advantage of an already high keyword set that drives good traffic.

Have you had any experiences where you had a keyword you were not really targeting high up on your list? What about your actual targeted keyword list? Have you been successful in climbing the rankings? What are some strategies or SEO methods you have used?